Russian Noun Lessons

Nouns are words that name things (laptop), people (teacher), and places (Moscow, Europe). when studying Russian nouns, the most important blocks of information that you need to learn revolve around the gender, number, declension and cases.

The gender can be masculine, feminine or neuter and is important to know because it affects the endings of other related words in a sentence, including pronouns, adjectives and past-tense verbs. The number of nouns can be either singular or plural. When Russian nouns change grammatical number, their endings undergo changes to reflect that fact. This is very similar to English nouns that obtain the -s or -es endings in the plural form, although there are more endings to memorize in Russian.

Declension of nouns is another type of changes in noun endings. Russian nouns decline (change their endings) according to several cases, each case showing the function of a noun and its relation to other words in a sentence. For example, the genitive case endings are used to convey possession same way as the ending -'s conveys possession in English. If you were to say John's brother in Russian, you would have to add the genitive ending -а to the noun John (Джон - John; брат Джона - John's brother). Note that the word order in Russian is more flexible as compared to English because the relationship between words is understood from the noun endings.

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